About the Journal

For over twenty years, Arts & Letters has attracted both emerging and well established writers, publishing the likes of R.T. Smith, Denise Duhamel, Donald Hall, Bret Lott, Maxine Kumin, Sonja Livingston, Opal Moore, Bob Hicok, Xu Xi, Lia Purpura, Marianne Boruch, and David Kirby.

Martin Lammon founded the journal in 1999 at Georgia College, where it continues to operate out of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Lammon served as Editor until 2015; under his guidance, Arts & Letters became a well-respected venue for poetry, fiction, and essays. The printed journal appears biannually, in Spring and Fall issues.

In 2015, Arts & Letters welcomed its second ever Editor, Laura Newbern, who stepped up from her post as Poetry Editor. Her 2010 collection of poetry, Love and the Eye, was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Kore Press First Book Award, and she is the recipient of a Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her work has appeared in The AtlanticThe Georgia ReviewPoetryBlack Warrior Review, and elsewhere.

Arts & Letters also boasts an all-new design, including beautiful full-color covers designed by Peter Selgin. Add these changes to the new, much-improved website and plenty of upcoming features, such as reviews of other journals and an archives spotlight section, and Arts & Letters is looking more lively and exciting than ever.

What does Arts & Letters publish?

Our editors seek work that doesn’t try too hard to grab our attention, but rather guides it toward the human voice and its perpetual struggle into language. We’re open to both formal and experimental fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; we’re also open to work that defies classification. Above all, we look for work in which we can feel writers surprising themselves.

We pay our contributors: click on “Submit” for details.

It is our joy to promote contributors in every way possible. For interested contributors, we tweet (Twitter handle: @ArtsLettersGC) lines from accepted pieces, and sometimes write up mini-profiles to publish on our news feed.

Follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter (in the sidebar to the left) to keep up with Arts & Letters news and events.